Thief dresses as Apple Store drone, walks off with $16,000 in iGear

'Genius Bar' didn't quite live up to its name this time

A thief in New York City was able lift more than $16,000 worth of Apple merchandise by dressing up as a store employee.

The brazen bloke walked into the SoHo Apple Store location at around 5.30PM on June 1, and took 19 iPhones from the store without being detected.

His clever disguise? A blue t-shirt that police said was "similar" to the uniform worn by Apple's retail store workers.

We're told the thief was able to pass as an employee long enough to walk through the store and into a repair room, where he accessed a drawer containing the iPhones. He then passed off the plundered handsets to an accomplice, who stuffed them under his shirt. Both of them exited the store without being stopped by security.

The stolen iPhones have been valued at $16,130 in total, and police are investigating the theft.

The New York Police Department is no stranger to dealing with stolen iStuffs. Thefts in mobile devices have been one of the few categories of street crime to steadily rise in the Big Apple in recent years, with Apple gear being the preferred target for thieves in many cases.

This caper is also a decidedly more covert operation than some of the Apple Store heists we have seen in the past. In 2014, a thief in Berkeley, California, took the brute force approach and smashed a stolen car through the front window of an Apple store before grabbing merchandise and running off.

Also that year, a group of Apple Store employees were nabbed for a scam that police say resulted in the theft of more than $500,000 worth of gear. ®